Top 26 Quotes by Mary McCarthy

In violence, we forget who we are.

The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that you really must make the self.

Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

If someone tells you he is going to make a 'realistic decision', you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.

Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.

I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets.

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.